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For search engine marketers who utilize paid search advertising, defining a campaign goal is amongst the first things to do when planning a campaign launch. What is the desired result of our PPC efforts? Is it to enhance our brand image by being visible on relevant and important keywords? Is it to drive web traffic to your site and increases visits? Or are you trying to get your visitor to be something more, to perform a certain activity? In the search engine marketing world, we call these actions “conversions”, and they can take many different forms: online retail purchases, information downloads, lead generation (contact information via user input), appointment request, insurance quote request, and many more.
Now that the internet, and our own web site development capabilities, has developed to a point that we can offer our visitors a specific conversion point, it is important to optimize our PPC campaigns to target those users who are most likely to perform our desired action. Not only do we want to drive paid search traffic to our site, we want to drive qualified paid search traffic to our site. After all, if we’re paying for the visits, we want to make the best use of our money by doing two things:
- Promote visits from users who are most likely to drive a conversion
- Eliminate traffic from visitors who are least likely to drive a conversion
Using an insurance agency as our example, how can we best qualify our PPC traffic to convert into a lead, via an “insurance quote request”? Let’s start with these two simple steps to get qualified leads. Stay tuned for my next blog post, which will cover two more steps to qualify your PPC traffic.
Step 1: Target value-based keywords
Sure, broad keywords will drive the most traffic to your site, but are they right for your campaign? The keyword “insurance” has a Google-estimated search volume of roughly 56,000,000 per month, a staggering amount, but it will also cost your company at least $35 every time someone clicks on your ad from this keyword search. Not only is it expensive, but do you really know what the visitor is actually looking for? After all, if someone is searching on the keyword “insurance”, they could be searching for any number of different things: insurance claim information, insurance careers, insurance research, etc. Do you really want to spend over $30 for every click, just to find out what the intent of the search was? Me neither. That’s why it is important to closely examine your keyword list to include some prudent generalized keywords (“auto insurance”, “car insurance”) in your campaign, but also to include some long-tail keywords that will attract those visitors that are more likely to request an insurance quote (“auto insurance quote”, “car insurance quote”, “home insurance prices”, “how can I get motorcycle insurance?”, “Pennsylvania homeowners insurance”).
By targeting these terms, you’re not only driving traffic that is more likely to generate a lead, but you’re also paying less for that traffic. Longer-tail keywords are less competitive in the search landscape, and therefore will cost you less per click than the broad keywords like “insurance”.
Step 2: Eliminate traffic that you absolutely do not want
Now that you’ve targeted the keywords that you are sure will drive qualified traffic, wouldn’t it be cool to eliminate the keywords that you don’t want to target? Introducing negative keywords. By utilizing this facet of your PPC campaign, you can tell the search engines which keywords that you do not want you ads associated with. By adding negative keywords to your campaign, you are providing a list of terms that, when a user incorporates them in their search, your search engine will know to never show your ad. This is particularly helpful because it will cut down on traffic to your site that has very little chance of converting into your desired action.
Continuing with the insurance agency example, and remembering that we are trying visitors to request a quote, I would begin my negative keyword list with terms that are too broad, are not relevant to our conversion point, or are misleading for our product. With that being said, the first negative keywords that I would target are aimed at careers in insurance. Add these keywords to your list: careers, jobs, employment, job, career, training.
See what you’ve done? You’ve eliminated the many people who are looking for jobs from your search universe. When you’re trying to drive revenue through quotes, why would you want to spend advertising money on people that are looking to further their career?
What other keywords can you think of that would drive traffic to your site, but almost certainly won’t drive conversions?
Check back here for my next post, where I’ll talk about how your paid search ad copy and landing pages can further help to qualify your traffic.
August 11, 2011 at 5:05 pm
[...] visitors through your paid search (SEM) campaign. In part one of this series, I discussed PPC keyword selection as the first two steps in qualifying traffic, and in part two I showed you how to optimize your ad [...]